Moving: the consequences

or Why I hate moving...

The trip to Ikea has been productive, but exhausting... So many people: it seems that the whole New Jersey population goes there on sundays.

It's been 3 weeks and I don't completely feel at home yet. A lot of work (painting, re-do the bathroom) has been done but it's still not finished.So almost every night we have contractors staying here until midnight. Nice people but quite loud.So it's either we have dinner in while they're here or we go out and when we come back we have to wait for them to finish their work for the evening.Plus sometimes they cancel without notice... Very frustrating. They were supposed to finish tonight, but I don't think they will. At least one more night... They always have an excuse not to work at the week end :-(

Elise has been decorating the apartment in the meanwhile and it looks really good now. The place is bigger than the previous one, and cheaper (thanks Harlem), so it is still very promising. Hopefully all the problems will be fixed soon.

Among other disturbances:
-the Internet is broken, so I have to sneak into the neighbor's intermittent connection. I can't post pictures until this is repaired...
-the heating for the building has not been switched on yet. They made a few attemps, but it smelled so bad (they were strong fuel odors in all of the apartment) that they had to stop it. It's now winter weather and pretty cold outside... Pretty cold inside too at times...

I hate moving...

This week end is going to be the move week end.
I'm not so thrilled about it :-(
We're moving out only because our landlords forced us to. They upped the rent going up by 20%! That can happen only in New York!
Anyway, we'll move 31 blocks to the North, Harlem next to Columbia University. Elise will be able to walk to the lab and hopefully my commute to midtown should not be much longer than now thanks to the express subway.

Hope I will survive...

Fortunately, I have a long week end with some climbing planned to relax after this stressful move...

The Narrows, Zion National Park, Utah

From Zion National...

Here are the ictures, stored on my Picasa Web Album.

Finally my camera is allright. It kind of died when it "touched" the water while crossing the chest deep Virgin river (check the last picture of the album...), but it wasn't actually too bad, after charging the battery the camera is back and the pictures safe!

Enjoy (and leave comments)! This was really an incredible overnight hike, very tiring but definitely worth it. Something we don't have in Europe, a true American experience...

Now THIS is a canyon!

We're just back from our latest trip out west.
Another flight to the sin city (i.e: Las Vegas, for those who forgot) and then a few days in Zion National Park hiking in a fantastic decor.
Then we had a 1/2 day in our beloved Red Rock Canyon to do a bit of sport climbing.

Pictures are coming soon!
The camera battery died in the middle of the hike but we managed to snap quite a lot of pictures before that.